The Swarm Gets Scary

In case you haven't heard, the hacker group LulzSec has just released a Great Big List of Emails along with their passwords. They haven't revealed where or how they got the list, rather they've released it simply to watch the chaos that ensues.

This is a very big deal, and your email address might be on the list, so I've re-posted it here (without the passwords of course), so you can go down the list, and search for your own address(es). If you find one on there, change the password immediately (if you can) and if you've ever conducted any financial business through that account (orders on Amazon, etc.) watch your credit card records for the coming months for suspicious activity.

When they were just hacking into and defacing websites or disabling company services, I was a big fan of LulzSec, but now that they're targeting innocents, they've lost my support and I can't be alone. Please, if you don't do so already, make sure that you follow these rules for passwords on your various Internet accounts:

• Use a different password for each account.
• Change that password (or the way in which you generate it) regularly.

On the one hand, they've done a lot of damage here, damage to people who really didn't deserve it. But at the very least, we can take this as a lesson on how to better protect ourselves online. It's only going to get more complicated from here on.